Biography

Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective – an avant-garde filmmaking movement – although his own films have taken a variety of approaches. His work has frequently divided critical opinion.

Von Trier began making films at age eleven. Von Trier suffers periodically from depression, as well as various fears and phobias, including an intense fear of flying. As he quipped in an interview, "basically, I'm afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking." His first publicly released film was the 1977 experimental short The Orchid Gardener and his first feature came seven years later with The Element of Crime (1984). Among many prizes, awards and nominations, he is the recipient of the Palme d'Or (for Dancer in the Dark), the Grand Prix, and the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

His two most recent films are Melancholia (2011), a visually impressive, emotionally depressing drama about the end of the world due to collision with another celestial body, and Nymphomaniac (2013).

In 1989, Von Trier's mother revealed on her deathbed that the man who he thought was his father was not, and that she had had a tryst with her former employer, Fritz Michael Hartmann (1909–2000), who descended from a long line of Roman Catholic classical musicians (his grandfather was Emil Hartmann, his great grandfather J.P.E. Hartmann, his uncles included Niels Gade and Johan Ernst Hartmann and thus Niels Viggo Bentzon was his cousin). She stated that she did this to give her son "artistic genes".